Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#290: Matthew Barley (Cellist) (pt. 1 of 2)
Today we released part one of our interview with renowned English cellist Matthew Barley. He has performed in over 50 countries, and with numerous orchestras including the BBC Philharmonic and the London Sinfonietta, and in venues from Ronnie Scott’s to Wigmore Hall.
In addition to being a busy performing musician, his varied experiences include founding Between the Notes, a performance and education group that works with musicians and artists in other arts genres; he was a former music director and presenter of the BBC2 Series Classical Star; and he founded the Matthew Barley Arts Foundation to run creative workshops using music and theatre to help university students improve their mental health.
Matthew’s most recent project is Light Stories, a new program for cello, electronics and visuals which launches this month in London’s Southbank Centre.
We hope you'll join us for Matthew's inspiring journey from a near-death experience as a teen to becoming a world-class performer. https://matthewbarley.com/
Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making art work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.
Andy Heise:Hi podcast listeners. My name is Andy Heise.
Nick Petrella:And I'm Nick Petrella. Renowned English cellist, Matthew Barley is with us today. He has performed in over 50 countries and with numerous orchestras, including the BBC Philharmonic and the London Sinfonietta, and in venues from Ronnie Scott's to Wigmore Hall. To being a busy performing musician, his varied experiences include founding Between the Notes, a performance and education group that works with musicians and artists in other arts genres. He was a former music director and presenter of the BBC Two series Classical Star, and he founded the Matthew Barley Arts Foundation to run creative workshops using music and theater to help university students improve their mental health. Matthew's most recent project is Light Stories, a new program for cello, electronics and visuals, which launched in London's South Bank Centre in September 2024. Matthew's website is in the show notes so you can check out the volume and variety of his activities. It's great to have you on the podcast, Matthew.
Matthew Barley:Wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Matthew Barley:Let's start by having you give us your backstory and why you chose to be an entrepreneur instead of pursuing the safe route of playing cello in an orchestra? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I think it possibly goes back to early teenage, when the first live band I ever saw was a little reggae band called black stallion and uh, and I thought they were absolutely incredible. I was totally bowled over. It was hebden bridge town hall. Um, we're talking back in the 70s now. Um, and I, straight after that, I just thought I want to be a reggae cellist. Um, sort of undeterred by the fact that there probably was no such thing as a reggae cellist.
Matthew Barley:But really that's characterized my whole career is that if I hear something I love, I either want to play it or I want to play with the musicians who I hear playing it. And I've always had very eclectic tastes. I've always listened to music from all genres, all eras. But just that desire, that sort of oh, I want to play with that I guess. I guess that set sail in the entrepreneurial direction.
Andy Heise:And can you share your journey of founding Between the Notes? As Nick mentioned in the introduction, what inspired you to create a group that combines musicians and artists from other genres?
Matthew Barley:yeah, um. Well, there's a lovely quote, I think it's by the french composer, claude debussy, who said the magic of music lies between the notes and um. It's a lovely quote and it's also something that I used to think about a lot when I used to run workshops with young people, with children, with students and so on and so forth. I was always amazed by how the wonder of making music was so accessible to young people. It's such a beautiful thing to witness such a beautiful thing to to make music with. You know, whereas we're in the profession, you know we've been doing it for so many years you can get a little bit jaded around the edges, and I felt so inspired by that, by that sort of spirit of making music.
Matthew Barley:And I remember one very, very formative experience where, I think back in my 20s, I was working in Japan with the London Sinfonietta and we were doing some workshops around the concerts in schools. And I can still remember the girl's name she she was called Hiromi, she was about eight years old and she played the triangle and the way she just kept this completely regular pulse going on the triangle was utterly captivating. Her eyes were shining, her whole body was absolutely intent on keeping this pulse and it was rhythmically so perfect and so inviting. And whenever I think of what really the core of the spirit of music making is, I think of hiromi, because it was just such a beautiful lesson in how to make music so that you know, making music in that way was really at the heart of forming the group between the nodes and over.
Matthew Barley:I think we were in existence for 10 or 12 years or something. We did 60, 70 major projects all around the world, working with anything from principals of the los angeles philharmonic, sydney symphony orchestra players to children with autism in the philippines, prisoners in wormwood scrubs prison in london, all sorts of different places to make music. But the basic thing was the same we just make music together. Yeah, that's great.
Nick Petrella:So you have a fascinating career that branches out in a variety of directions. Did you think you would do that when you were at college, or did it grow organically? And specifically, how did you prepare for new opportunities?
Matthew Barley:prepare for new opportunities. I think it probably grew very organically. Yeah, I mean, I had a again.
Matthew Barley:Another formative experience was at the Guildhall when I was studying in London from the age of 18 to 22. And there was a module on my course called it was a very clunky title Music and Performance Communication Skills, and I and I thought, oh, that sounds interesting, and I took the course. We, we went into a school and old people's home in a prison. We ran workshops there and we studied improvisation, we did some theater exercise classes on communications and I thought this was all fascinating and and even sort of more exciting than all that. Somehow all the people who took part in the course we used to discuss what music was for, what music was for in society and what our visions were for how you could use arts in society, and I found that so exciting. Um, so I think from that point I was always looking for opportunities to work in unusual ways and it just sort of slowly ballooned out from there over the years In terms of preparing for new opportunities.
Matthew Barley:Well, the chap who ran that course at the Guildhall was called Peter Renshaw. He had recently retired as the principal of the Yehudi Menuhin School. As the principal of the Yehudi Menuhin School and he used to say to me he said, matthew, you're the kind of person who will run and take a dive into a swimming pool and halfway down you'll look to see if there's any water there. And he was absolutely right. That's very much the way I've always done things.
Andy Heise:Is that a compliment?
Matthew Barley:I think it was possibly a bit of both.
Andy Heise:He was speaking about your passion.
Matthew Barley:He was speaking about my passion. I. I suppose, um, whether it's a compliment or it depends on whether there was any water in the swimming pool, but, um, you know, occasionally I've hurt my head, but it's also, you know, it's, it's part of the reason I've done so many of these very unusual things, because I haven't thought about them too much. I've always just gone on gut instinct. If it feels good, I'm going to do it, and I'll work out how to get there and how to deal with it when I get there.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, and did you do a lot of depping?
Matthew Barley:You mean sort of substituting in orchestras and stuff. Yeah, yeah, I used to do a lot of that in the 90s and I studied at the moscow conservatoire as well as a postgraduate student. So when I came back from that I began working in london um yeah, mostly depping, in fact, in the london orchestras, as principal shallowo played in all the big London orchestras in those days for a few years, had some amazing experiences, you know, working with conductors like Lauren Marzell and Leonard Bernstein and all sorts of extraordinary musicians. But after a few years of that I got a little bit disillusioned because we never used to rehearse that much and I used to find that, you know, things would get to sort of nine out of 10 very quickly in the London music scene.
Matthew Barley:The musicians were so fast, but I was personally frustrated at never being able to get things a little bit better. So that's when I took a different direction, in the sort of solo direction.
Nick Petrella:And that's kind of what I was going at. I was wondering if you tested the waters and decided not to ultimately pursue an orchestral career because you had that experience.
Matthew Barley:Yeah, it was exactly that. Yeah, and I think you know I was very lucky in a sense because I had four or five years of working at the top end of the London orchestral business with some, you know, incredible conductors and wonderful tours around the world. I didn't do it long enough to ever get bored of it, so I've got lovely memories of it. It just got to that moment I just thought I can stretch myself more artistically elsewhere. Great Sure, and in fact there's quite a nice story about that, because I was on trial for the co-principal cello of the London Symphony Orchestra and being on trial in these co-principal cello of the london symphony orchestra and being on trial in these orchestras takes forever because you know you've got to go in when the principal conductor's there, the principal guest conductor, all the different principals, the different sections, and they're checking out other musicians.
Matthew Barley:And as the trial was going on, I was starting to get more and more solo work and I was thinking, oh, maybe things are taking off. And I said to them look, not sure what to do, you know, should I continue with the trial? And they said, look, we'd love you to take the job. They offered me the job and they said you know, it doesn't matter if you're not able to fulfill the contract, because I think it started in three months' time, but we'd just love to have you and I thought, wow, that's a lovely invitation. And then, a few weeks later, I got invited to play um a concert with an indian musician at the south bank center, um, one of the greatest indian musicians alive, amjad ali khan, and, and. It clashed with um a huge world tour with pierre boula's conducting, and, and I. It was one of those moments those simple moments.
Matthew Barley:I just thought I've got to do the Indian dude. So that's when I said to the orchestra very sorry, I can't take up the contract. They were lovely about it, but it was again another turning point.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, it's great.
Andy Heise:It's a great story well, and so what advice would you give to aspiring musicians and artists who maybe haven't ventured that far from traditional boundaries of their, of their artistic practice, or whatever it might be, uh, and who maybe, like, have this curiosity about exploring something new, innovative, different, um, different ways to do their work?
Matthew Barley:yeah, well, I the first thing I'd say and maybe it doesn't apply so much to the younger generation coming through With my generation, you know, there was obviously there was no streaming, there was no internet, and I think that made a difference to the amount of music that people consumed, and there were people who were very content to just live in that classical music world with its sort of walls around them.
Matthew Barley:I think these days everybody listens to everything, and that's, I think that's the first step is be adventurous with your listening so that you can fall in love with musics from all around the world and all types of shapes and sizes world in all types of shapes and sizes. Um, and then the second thing I would say would be um, just try and find ways to try stuff out with friends, because I you know, understandably some people might be nervous about trying different genres in professional situations, but I think once you understand the joy that can be had from making music in different types of ways, that's a big turning point. And then, just to add to that, the really important thing is learn to improvise. That's, you know, for classical musicians I think it's something that's becoming more and more prevalent, but that's the key that will unlock music making with anybody and everybody, from all around the world.
Nick Petrella:Learn to improvise. Yeah, yeah, that's great.
Andy Heise:Certainly, certainly wasn't a a point of of emphasis in my classical training. I can, I can, no, I can reinforce that, so I sadly not yeah yeah, so maybe, maybe like taking that question one step further, further and diving a little deeper into that improvisation piece. So how would you encourage a classically trained or a person who's going through classical training to begin to explore improvisation?
Matthew Barley:It's a very good question. Over the years I've done a lot of teaching to classical musicians, getting them to improvise. It's much easier in a group than it is one-to-one. To begin, um, it's actually very easy to begin in a group. Uh, it's something that I've um become quite a specialist at with orchestras, because orchestral musicians are famously terrified of improvising. But, uh, get them in a group, and I have my ways and means. Um, if you're on your own it's a little bit harder.
Matthew Barley:But what I would say is um find a way um you can find them online, you can download them, you can record them yourself of making a drone, just a single node, which, of course, is the basis of all indian music. All indian music works over a single stationary ground, note, um, and then just test the waters, note by note, with that drone. Um, it's actually a technique in indian classical music. They're called rasa, which is note tasting. So you play any note you want with the drone and of course, there can be no wrong notes when you're just putting them with the drone the 12 to choose from and you check out all the different flavors. You know how does the semitone taste compared with the fourth or the fifth, and so on. How does the minor six taste compared with the major six? And just play around with those different tastes of the intervals and pretty soon you're going to be making melodies. Those intervals are the basis of melodic invention and that's a pretty good way to start.
Nick Petrella:And to your point. So our son wants to be a professional musician in an orchestra and he was just at a festival and the conductor said who wants to take a solo? I can't remember the piece and he said who wants to take a solo? I can't remember the piece. And he said, yeah, and it's because he experimented with jazz improv years ago. Nice, oh, fantastic, but won out of the whole ensemble, I believe.
Matthew Barley:Really well Good for him.
Nick Petrella:No, I mean won interested to say To your point.
Matthew Barley:Okay, gotcha, yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Nick Petrella:So, matthew, one of the goals of this podcast is to help students and young professionals, as well as audience, understand the landscape of their particular arts ecosystem, and we sometimes touch upon what's included in the cost of goods sold, but we've never spoken about the cost of a rare instrument or the cost to insure it. To help people better understand the overhead of someone doing what you do, would you consider giving us a ballpark value of your cello?
Matthew Barley:and the cost to insure it? Yes, by all means. I mean, as far as I know, I haven't actually had it revalued for a while. I think these instruments are usually valued in dollars as well, and I would think my cello at the moment is somewhere around the half a million dollar mark. I bought it quite a long time ago when it was a fraction of that cost, thank goodness. And the insurance is about a thousand pounds a year, so it's not. You know the insurance is not too bad a year, so it's not. You know the insurance is not too bad.
Matthew Barley:Um, but the the costs you know this is this is a very tricky thing for musicians these days is because the costs are going up so much. Yeah, uh, you know I wouldn't be able to afford an instrument like that now at all. Um, and you know, a lot of the really, really top instruments are even more expensive than that. We're talking millions of dollars for Stradivarius and things like that. But you know I would add to that there are very, very skilled modern makers. You know you can find yourself a very, very high quality cello or violin, for I mean tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands, which is still a lot of money, but it's better than hundreds.
Nick Petrella:And it's just something for people listening. I mean, what goes into the pricing of your services and the recordings and everything? You're doing and that needs to be taken into consideration.
Matthew Barley:Yeah.
Andy Heise:What about maintaining an instrument of that calibre and of that age?
Matthew Barley:frankly, yeah, I mean, I have a chap in London who looks after my cello, but there's actually very little to do really. You know, I change the top string every six months. I change the bottom string every four or five years literally, which is fairly extraordinary, but they last a long time. They're not cheap. The bottom string is getting on for £100, but you know, you get several years out of it and then, other than that, you know, I used to find that the cello would open up quite a lot. So you know, the cello is 270 years old. It sustained cracks over that time and, in a nutshell, when you travel, there are obviously different climactic conditions.
Matthew Barley:Humidity probably makes more of a difference to an instrument than temperature and on an airplane you're talking about, humidity is somewhere around three to five percent yeah so if you're traveling on an airplane long haul, then coming out in a country where it's wet you know 80, 90 humidity that cello is really going to complain and what happens is that the glue that holds the old cracks together and the whole cello together really going to complain. And what happens is that the glue that holds the old cracks together and the whole cello together and the wood expand and contract at different rates. So that's when you get problems. But having said that, I haven't had the cello touch wood.
Matthew Barley:I haven't had the cello open up for years, so you know it's actually surprisingly low maintenance. You know I give it a wipe down after every single day's practice, but other than that it's pretty hassle-free.
Andy Heise:I suppose over 270 years. Whatever's going to happen to it has probably already happened.
Matthew Barley:That could well be true. It's settled Knocking on all of the wood around here. Definitely settled down.
Andy Heise:yes, At least that's my philosophy with my about a hundred year old house. Surely it's done settling as much as it's going to settle. What about your bow or bows?
Matthew Barley:The bow I have. It's a modern bow. It costs about, I think, £4,000 to get made and it's an absolute beauty. It's a very heavy bow. It's a copy of an old english tubs bow that I had made. Um, I've got quite skinny arms, so a big, heavy bow compensates for that nicely sure so shifting gears a little bit to, uh, the matthew barley arts foundation.
Andy Heise:What was the impetus for starting that?
Matthew Barley:So the impetus really was. It was twofold. Partly it was seeing more and more in the press over recent years about the sort of epidemic of mental health problems in universities in the UK. I think much of that was exacerbated by the pandemic, the sort of isolation that young people were subject to then during lockdowns, which is the very opposite, of course, of what young people should doing, should be doing and um. So that was one thing. Just, you know, a very natural concern. Reading about that, especially at a time of life when you should be having the best time imaginable. You know you leave home and you go out into the world. It should be just such a joyful occasion. Yeah, so that was one of the things then.
Matthew Barley:The other thing was looking back on my own story and realizing just how much music had helped me in my life. You know, when I was a teenager things could have gone quite badly wrong in various ways, but music, I think, probably saved my life, and the nourishment and joy from making music together and just the pure healing power of music itself, which is something quite extraordinary, made such a difference to me in my life. I just started to think, well, maybe there's a way of creating an offering for university students. You need a foundation of some kind to be a vehicle for these sorts of projects in the UK to attract funding, and we're just in the middle of a pilot project. We've got a researcher on board and we've done the first project in Leeds University already. We've got a couple of others coming up in autumn and we'll have some documentation and evidence after that to show how the course that we've designed actually works. But yeah, on the strength of the first one, it's. It's very, very exciting.
Andy Heise:It's a beautiful avenue of work and that that's the focus on mental health exactly of musicians specifically, or is it more broad than that, or it's.
Matthew Barley:I mean, we're looking at sort of performing arts at the moment. So musicians, dancers, theater, um. And with a colleague of mine who's a singer and an actor, we've developed this curriculum which is very much about creative music making and theater making and song making together and um, and just how that can impact on our mental health and ways to use creativity and the performing arts and things like that to to sort of underpin, um and maintain really positive mental health. Gotcha yeah.
Andy Heise:That sounds. Sounds fascinating and much needed. To your point yeah, I think so, and you know, you know it's a.
Matthew Barley:It's one of my favorite topics really. Um, what's music for? It's a, it's a. It's a thing that I started to look into many years ago. I started to wonder well, what, what is music for?
Matthew Barley:Everybody around the world makes music all cultures, all histories, everywhere but what's it? And so I started to do a lot of research. I did a lot of talking. I spoke to musicians from the Kogi tribe in Colombia, which was particularly fascinating because they had only recently been in inverted commas discovered.
Matthew Barley:Wow, they were thought to be a myth until a team of TV journalists from the BBC discovered them in the 1970s, right at the top of the Altiplano, the highest mountain. They had fled there in 1492 when they heard about the conquistadors stayed there for half a millennium, and so, of course, the amazing thing about listening to their music is it's never had any outside influence at all. So, talking to them about their music, how they made it, why they made it, and then also reading various things online, and particularly for the ancient greeks and the ancient chinese, um, it's very, very clear that way, before music became anything to do with the performance art, it was a healing art. That's what humans invented music for was to heal, to bring people together, to nourish people and to maintain that good mental health that I'm talking about in the universities. So it's you know I'm doing nothing new at all. I'm trying to get back to the roots of what music is actually for in our society to bring people together and to heal people individually and as communities. That's great.
Nick Petrella:What can you tell us about Light Stories? What's it about and how is the project?
Matthew Barley:funded. So I mean Light Stories is a very personal one for me. It came from a sort of a near tragedy as a teenager when, during a very unwise drugs overdose, I had a psychotic episode, tried to commit suicide. Things went horribly wrong. That's where music stepped in my boarding school in Manchester and that's where I really did feel that I was saved by music. I'd gone off the rails for various reasons as a teenager, which I won't go into here, but, um, the way that music saved me was so beautiful and so poignant to me and um, and I started to think again.
Matthew Barley:During the lockdown we had a lot of time to think, yeah, um, I. I started to think, well, maybe I could create something from this whole story of you know what so nearly went wrong, all the dramas around that teenage time and how music has helped me ever since, and in my marriage, my family, what a big thing music has always been and how lucky I am to have had the career I've had. I feel so grateful. I feel so grateful for all the opportunities, all the musicians I've met, all the wonderful experiences I've had, and I started thinking, yeah, maybe there's something creative I could do with this. So you know, the ideas gradually came. I started composing for the first time, writing new music, creating this series of movements which I call light stories, which is is the recording which I'm literally, tomorrow, finishing in the morning, last studio day, and taking on to the stage at the South Bank Centre in September. It's been a really great adventure, you know, learning to compose, learning all the studio skills necessary. I've got this home studio, uh, and I've done all the recording myself at home, which has also been wonderful. Yeah, so it's been. It's been a fantastic adventure. I've loved almost every minute.
Matthew Barley:Okay, occasionally it's been stressful, um, the funding question, um. So I was very, very lucky. I got a grant for £30,000 from a charity called the Nicholas Berwyn Charitable Trust to develop the visuals for the concert. You know, as you probably know, creating video content is not cheap. You know, I've got two or three guys on this working for several weeks and this grant will help to create something very, very special on two screens that I have just behind me. So that's been a real lifeline in terms of the creative lifeblood of the project. And then also, funding comes from the people, the places and people who are hosting the concert. So at the moment, that's the South Bank Centre, st George's in Bristol and the Royal Welsh Academy in Cardiff. There are various other performances lined up in Europe for next year which will bring in some more income.
Nick Petrella:And are those, you know, week-long? How long are the engagements? Single shows week-long month.
Matthew Barley:Well, two shows actually at the South Bank Center as part of their opening weekend of the classical music season, and then after that they'll just be one-off concerts. Yeah, gotcha.
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